How Hard Determinists Reject Free Will

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Robert Sapolsky, Paul Bloom, and Lucy Allais debate whether free will exists and what this would mean for punishment and morality.

The deny free will, and are strong determinists.

0:33 [Host] So, Robert, um, do do you do you see your position as being driven by a defense of materialism or physicalism? Is that what is motivating you? That there's just no no alternative. you can't give any account of free will and therefore uh because you can't give an account of free will within the uh within the scientific framework uh you think that we have to then deny free will

[Sapolsky] basically I think by now the extent of scientific knowledge is such that it forms this matrix of explanation and that within that matrix um it is a purely materialistic one and every attempt to find free will lurking in there requires some sort of violation of show we know these matrices work. In that regard, I completely agree with Lucy um that trying to make sense of human behavior by going down to bosons is absurd.

I believe that this is just wrong as a matter of our scientific knowledge. There are no such completely deterministic matrices.

If you think I am wrong, tell me when did science prove determinism? Who wrote the paper? Who did the experiment? Who got the Nobel Prize? Why isn't this in textbooks?

Sapolsky just babbles gibberish when asked this question:

Isn't there still the question of well you presumably have made a decision uh at some level to take part in this debate. you you uh wrote a book trying to convince people of uh the idea that we should see free will as an illusion. And you were presumably doing that because you wanted to change their minds. But what was the point if they couldn't change their minds in the first place?

Sapolsky is probably the leading academic opponent of free will, and he is a crackpot.